Too shallow to satisfy as a memoir, but may appeal to believers.
One woman’s testimonial of her journey from willful child to drug lord to servant of God.
With the assistance of veteran co-author Ritz (Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, 2009, etc.), Thompson-Hairston begins near the end, with the author hiding out in a luxurious Miami Beach hotel, fleeing incarceration. Though being on the lam didn’t faze her—she was well-equipped with fake IDs and numerous safe houses—she was extremely worried about the separation from her young son. The guilt drove her to return home to Los Angeles for his sixth-grade graduation, where federal agents awaited her arrival. Following her dramatic arrest outside her son’s school, the author presents herself “before the game.” Unfortunately, most of the real excitement has passed, and the remainder of the book is largely a recitation of facts and name-dropping. After a brief childhood stint at her grandmother’s in Mississippi, Thompson-Hairston returned to California with a vague sense of the importance of family and an aching desire for a boyfriend. She soon fell for Daff, the charming neighborhood pot dealer, and joined him in business, reaping the material benefits. However, while viewing the opulence on display during an episode of Dallas, she realized that she and Daff were only “hood rich.” So the author decided to increase the stakes by dealing in a more lucrative drug, cocaine. It went well. She and Daff built their empire, becoming suppliers to several cities and growing increasingly wealthy, and they shared their good fortune with their community, throwing barbecues and providing employment. The situation presents a unique scenario of drug dealer strictly as businessperson, never indulging, never losing control. But Thompson-Hairston doesn’t adequately explore this facet, and, without a drug-fueled implosion or violent mayhem—there are some fisticuffs and an off-screen, unexplored murder—the book lacks the salacious elements that make criminal memoirs compelling. Instead she went to prison and found God, and she gives Him all the glory.
Too shallow to satisfy as a memoir, but may appeal to believers.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-54288-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Avon a/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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